Review

Table of Poems

Review

I picked this up from the bookstore after loving Love Leda so much. I have been trying to read a little more poetry. Like my recent review for Rupi Kaur’s The Sun & Her Flowers, I have no idea how to review poetry. I don’t know what good poetry looks like or what bad poetry looks like. All I know is that sometimes words are strung together and they give me an emotional reaction. So that’s what I’m rating this collection on.

I liked them! Some are depressed, some are lovesick, some are funny, some are farcical. In some, you can imagine the poet sitting at a typewriter and hitting his head against it trying to make things come out. I can understand that, at least to an extent. None of them hit me in any way comparable to how Love, Leda, did. They are not really personal (to me), but they’re nice to read.

It was lovely to read poetry written by a man about a man in a romantic or at least yearning way. I am pretty sure I’ve never had that experience before (at least, not knowingly). You do certainly feel the 60’s England of it all. Some of the yearning is written in very rigid gender roles and that is a bummer. Still, there is an emotional thing that it sort of communicates. It comes across most starkly in “‘Let Him Go In My Mind’”, “Oral Pictures of Love” and “True Homosexual Love” (and certainly in the title of that one). In some of these, words like man and girl are juxtaposed in a transferencial (cannot believe I just wrote that sentence, what a snob I sound like). In some, Hyatt writes about being a wife or a woman to the object of the poem.

It’s a pretty interesting way of writing, to read in 2025. You wonder what is poetic license, the author communicating the ideas that go along with those concepts, and what is just a reflection of the author’s understanding of gender constructs at that time. Still, if you’re willing to empathize with the words, I think you can understand them. Two of those were some of my favorites (favs in a table below).

Then again, another one of my favorites is this little ditty:

when cornflakes fart
boy how I sing

Another one that gave me a big chuckle:

“I LOVE MY ARSE TO BE SUCKED”

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I love my arse to be sucked
it makes me come awfully nice
and I stretch the body open

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you and today’s fixed fantasies
report you are bored by shit
that’s because you’re fucking weird

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you write ugly poems to death
and you are a whore for words
you’re a lovely tragedy

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balls on your stupid words
have games with your bloodless wife
and let imagination go

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now if you really care
and honestly understand
then gently die

Now, I have absolutely no idea what that is saying (other than the first two lines, I guess). But it is hilarious. I haven’t read much poetry, but what I have didn’t ever have the words “you’re” and “fucking” and “weird” in that order. Gave me a good chuckle.